an opinionated sports blog

October 6, 2010

It is finally time to completely give up on cycling forever. For the umpteenth time, the guy who won the Tour de France has failed a doping test.

How many times are we going to be put through this mess? A guy gets caught by the sport’s increasingly improved tests, he makes up a lame excuse, another sample comes back positive and then he blames something else.

That’s pretty much the line that Contador is taking right now. First, he was caught with a small amount of a banned substance in his blood He predictably blamed something stupid: Eating tainted meat. Next, another sample showed that he had high levels of plastic residue in it. That sort of thing would weird, unless you had a blood transfusion, something that Contador also denies.

It is actually quite the clever idea. Transfuse your own blood to work the drugs out. I’m surprised that someone else hasn’t thought of it sooner. In fact, they probably have and were just never caught.

Either way, right or wrong, it’s time to completely ditch cycling. Between the many Lance Armstrong allegations, Floyd Landis and his ridiculous excuses and now this, a three-time Tour winner being sullied, how much more can this sport really take?

It’s time for the Tour de France and all of cycling to take some time off. End this mockery of a once-proud event. Why not at least suspend it for a year to try to regroup and recoup some of the sport’s credibility? It only makes sense to back off, or risk this same hurtful cycle happening again next summer. And then the next summer. And then the next …